Is there a way to create a mini amazon or eBay on here where several sellers can get together and...

[AmericanLocket]

...each be responsible for procuring & listing their own merchandise, each receive their own sold notification emails, ship their own sales, and get their cut deposited to their individual payment account?

Let's say four friends or family members want to start an e-commerce site selling books and each photographs and lists 20 books for sale. 80 books are now for sale on their new joint book website. Each has all the admin permissions to access everything to make changes/updates, but they only are interested in their own merchandise and want to be able to tag their listings to correspond with receiving email notifications only when their merchandise sells: Mary's book sells, only Mary gets an email to ship, and the payment for only her sale goes to her payment account. When one of Sally's books sell, Sally gets the good news she made a sale and needs to ship it out to the buyer, but the others are not notified of this - it is not their merch, not their job to ship it, not their dough. Each member of the selling group is only responsible for her merchandise and the others are not bothered or notified when one of them makes a sale. And the sales revenue for the one account/site shared by these four people is directed to the four different bank accounts and is based on each's specific sales.

This idea comes from my antique mall days: different dealers in the same building all have merchandise for sale - each item is tagged with a description, price, and the dealer number; when the customer brings items to check out, the cashier inputs each item into the system, noting the dealer number, and in this way tags or directs the price paid to that dealer's running account, which settles and pays out every two weeks via paper check. 

Is there a way to recreate that online already?

[JoesIdeas · Accepted solution]

You can do some of this:

each be responsible for procuring & listing their own merchandise

- If they are all staff members of the Shopify store, which sounds like it in your case yes. If you only want them to be able to see their own stuff, you would need to use an app and have a separate portal to modify the products. I created a custom app for a store a few years ago that does this. I made a separate website portal for people to log in and upload / edit their products, that connected to the Shopify store. There might be a public app by now that does this, not sure.

each receive their own sold notification emails

- You can use Order Automator app to send different notification emails to different people, based on the products in the order (or any other order detail)

ship their own sales

- Yes, since they have access to the store they can mark their own orders. Using that same Order Automator app, you could have each person's orders automatically get tagged, so that when they log into Shopify they can just use a shortcut link to show all of their tagged orders. You could also set it up so that notification email that sends out I mentioned above, includes a link to update the tracking without logging into Shopify.

and get their cut deposited to their individual payment account?

- No. The Shopify store is owned by a business. This business needs to have a payment account attached to it. What you could do is create monthly sales reports and then PayPal everyone their share (income from their tagged orders minus shared operating expenses).

You could start an LLC or corporation, and have the 4 be shareholders, but you may find that people lose interest when they don't get immediate sales (it takes longer than most people realize to build a successful ecommerce business), so having everyone as a business partner might not be a good idea. Especially family and friends, business relationships often do not work if the people involved have not previously had past business relationships together. And It's quite common for business relationships to change the dynamic (sometimes negatively) of current relationships.

If it were me, I would appoint 1 person to be the owner that manages this business, then the people that sell on it get the majority profit of their product, with the business taking 20% or so for the platform / expenses. Or you could do a partnership with more than 1 person, just make sure you know that person is as committed as you are.

With a clear business owner, your family / friends can take part on a more casual basis, with the pressures of running and growing a business. And you share in each other's success through more sales, and if it doesn't work out it's easy for them to walk away from the project.

Good luck, have fun!

[AmericanLocket]

Thank you for the detailed response. Is your app available? I'm considering when I would create such a site in the next few months and seeing which platform could work the best for this. I agree that it's best for one person to be in charge to do the main administering and leading of the site.

[JoesIdeas]

No sorry it was a custom app I built specifically for 1 store. Was just mentioning that to let you know it's doable, you'd just need to build a custom app / website to handle. When the time comes if you haven't found a public app or a solution for this, feel free to reach out to my team at orderautomator.com/contact we can build something for you.